Bird.makeup: a Twitter to ActivityPub bridge | Hacker News Reader

Bird.makeup: a Twitter to ActivityPub bridge

bird.makeup

107 pointstambourine_man45 comments

There are a bunch of services like this out there.

One unfortunate unintended consequence of these is that people from Twitter often get the impression that Mastodon is full of impersonator accounts!

Try a search for "web3isgreat" on any popular instance to see an example of the problem - here's a screenshot: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109835687372186227

It's not a huge deal, but I've certainly seen people get upset because they don't understand Mastodon yet and they think it's already full of people impersonating them.

> but I've certainly seen people get upset because they don't understand Mastodon yet

This sentence reminded me of another incident. Ben Boyter launched a service called Mastinator [0], like Mailinator, where you can create disposable fediverse accounts. The fantastic use of this is that you can anonymously follow anyone you want. However, it wasn't taken well by the people. They started sending hateful and abusive messages to Boyter. A popular user tooted [1] something like this, and do check the entire conversation:

> A site called Mastinator (https://mastinator.com) has started aggregating and republishing toots without permission. It creates accounts with your handle and follows you to get your toots (e.g., @aral@mastinator.com, which, just to make clear, is not me).

> @boyter You could, yes. But if you set up an account in my name on your instance, I would call you out for impersonating me and using my name/identity without permission.

They were angry that this service let you access their public posts without permission. It is fediverse! It is supposed to be public and federated! He also started getting hate from other people in the fedi, and many fedi instances started blocking the service. He wrote about his experience with fedi and the aftermath, which is an excellent post educating users about how ActivityPub functions. [2]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34156395

[1] - https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/109585159213960986

[2] - https://boyter.org/posts/mastinator-activitypub-breaking-ass...

> It is fediverse! It is supposed to be public and federated!

That's the bad assumption. Federation =! Public. If someone does something abhorrant/annoying/harmful on another instance, you should be able to disconnect from them. Just because an API exists doesn't entitle you to abuse it.

I have somewhat conflicting views about this.

On one hand I think that twitter users should be able to prevent the service from mirroring their accounts if they want to. Which would be technically difficult, and, since everyone would probably act on it if presented with the option, it would make the service mostly useless.

On the other hand they posted public messages on twitter. This service provides a slightly more specialized type of indexing from a search engine, so content should be fair game.

> There are a bunch of services like this out there.

Yes,

  pruvisto.org/debirdify
  moa.party
  twitodon.com
  fedifinder.glitch.me
  github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge
  opencheck.is/scitwitter
  bird.makeup

Hrm, that list seems off. moa.party is an opt-in crossposter, where you have to authenticate to your account on both sides. Debirdify and Fedifinder are services to find your Twitter follows on Mastodon, based on pointers they've left in their bio, display name, or in pinned posts; they don't post anything.

That said, there are dozens of "BirdsiteLIVE" instances which are "public" crossposters (where you don't need to be, or get the approval of, the Twitter account being crossposted). A while ago in a thread on hachyderm.io's community issue tracker I came up with a list of a couple dozen without much effort.

I see you operate that mastodon, do you have control over the UI or is it all from upstream? Horizontal scrolling being (unintentionally?) enabled coupled with a 'position: fixed' sidebar feels very odd on mobile.

I don't actually use the web interface there at all myself - I use https://elk.zone/ on my laptop and Ivory on my iPhone.

> I don't actually use the web interface there at all myself - I use https://elk.zone/ on my laptop

Elk is just another web interface, isn't it?

I meant I don't use the default Mastodon web interface at https://fedi.simonwillison.net - I use Elk as an alternative to that.

Yeah, although a fair bit better than the default.

I’m using Wooly on my iPhone, but might give ivory a shot now that it’s launched.

> Ivory

Tapbot's "Ivory" app is for iOS, but there is an abandoned "Ivory for Mastodon"[0] for Android by Asko Nõmm[1].

Does Tapbot violates copyright on the 3rd-party client app name for Mastodon?

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.askonomm.i...

[1] https://github.com/askonomm

You don't hold a copyright on just a name. Trademarks are for that but have to be applied for.

Trademarks don’t need to be applied for - a “common law trademark” is established through use. Much harder to protect than a “registered trademark” though, as you need to actively defend, rather than the mark simply being present in a registry.

^ "Ivory for Mastodon" even was opensource, but its repo unavailable anymore.[2]

[2] https://github.com/askosh/ivory

> might give ivory a shot

Worth noting that currently they only support Mastodon instances[1]. Akkoma/Pleroma will give a blank timeline; GotoSocial will give nothing but the same status. I asked them about it a couple of weeks back but got no reply.

[1] I suspect they've used int64 for their status IDs because Mastodon does, ignoring the bit in the spec which says "don't rely on this".

just in case anyone is wondering:

imho, ivory by tapbots is by far the best client. i think it’s far and away the best ios client.

What horizontal scrolling?

Trying to drag the content horizontally causes it to attempt to scroll then immediately rebound. On its own this is a strange stylistic decision, but coupled with the sidebar position being fixed it just looks sloppy.

This isn't mobile only, on desktop the center content can be scrolled horizontally and it overlaps very oddly with the side content there too.

All in all it feels like a rushed job.

Maybe this is an iOS thing because of it's "rubber band" scrolling. In any case this is just Mastodon's standard UI, so maybe you could open a bug over there?

FWIW, I feel like I at least mostly understand the premise of Mastadon and how it works--though there are crucial details I know I don't related to how replies interact with federation (exactly where the data gets cached and stored in such cases... it isn't clear to me if that content is "owned" by the server of the parent or the child, and then how other servers manage to find it)--and I'd still be extremely frustrated by a public/discoverable mirror/proxy of my content, and will claim that that consequence isn't just an "impression" but is actually a fair description of what is going on.

Let's put it this way: is it really any fundamentally different from someone setting up an Instagram account for someone else who is only on TikTok and then copying all of their content there, because they prefer using the Instagram client or don't want to install the TikTok app? I'll claim "no": the federated nature of Mastadon doesn't actually change why people want to do this and it doesn't even change the mechanism for how it is being done. Now, maybe you are OK with such mirrors--and, FWIW, I can begrudgingly defend that position if required to--but I hope it provides the right framing.

I'm also going to assert that you should not ascribe benign intent to people doing this, even if initially it seems fair to do so or you yourself are the person doing it and you swear you are just providing access: I've seen people do this kind of thing--including to me, as I have in the past been considered to have extremely high-value / sought-after content (back when I was posting updates about iOS jailbreaks)--many times over the years, and eventually they realize they now have a ton of followers on "their" account and can start inserting their own content or even modifying mine.

Meanwhile, people end up trying to contact me by messaging a mirror account--as while some of those in your screenshot are ostentatiously adding "[UNOFFICIAL MIRROR]" to every tweet, not all of them are--as they absolutely do just look like an official account and so people follow it and then start responding and communicating with it... that simply never goes well for anyone: I have definitely had people reach out to me complaining about interactions they had with "me" when they were actually communicating with some random person providing a content mirror / translation.

If you want to do something like this for a service, it should either be part of your client (as opposed to a server/protocol issue) or (barring that, and given Twitter now trying to red team people with their API, I get it) be more like how people build XMPP bridges: something that is pretty ostentatiously a special bridge mechanism to the consumer who probably themselves actively installed and configured it so it is really clear what is going on, rather than it merely being a bunch of "this is just a regular user account" accounts created by people who are claiming to be neutral.

> someone setting up an Instagram account for someone else who is only on TikTok and then copying all of their content there, because they prefer using the Instagram client

I don’t mean to challenge my teenage hero, but I don’t see why this is even remotely okay.

I don't think it is OK--in fact, I'm kind of assuming most people would think that that is not OK and leaning into that for my analogy: that isn't OK... and so neither should we consider public/discoverable Twitter account mirrors on Mastodon to be OK--so hopefully we are actually in agreement! ;P

For Twitter at least, this seems to be explicitly allowed by their terms of service[0]:

"You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content).

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same."

[0]https://twitter.com/en/tos

I'll point out that a bajillion people have had their content mirrored on marc.info without necessarily realizing it was happening. I think that's a little different, but also not so different.

It is interesting to compare that situation. FWIW, I consider it much more than merely "a little" different, but I can also see how there are some critical similarities.

To me, the big difference stems from the difference in presentation and purpose: I can't imagine many people search for the real mailing list, finds an archive on marc.info, and then subscribes to that instead of the real mailing list.

It is similar to how I do not personally mind at all that web.archive.org mirrors my website at https://web.archive.org/https://www.saurik.com/ with giant banners at the top showing "this is the internet archive"; but, if someone merely created a live mirror of my website at https://www.saurik2.com/, I'd be pretty pissed.

Put differently, for me, the core problem is one of trademarks... I have strongly mixed opinions on the value of copyright, but I am a firm believer in the purpose of trademarks (even if the specific laws I always have some issue with).

In case people don't know what "ActivityPub" is (there are a few of you out there!), it's an open spec for social media sites to interoperate in a federated manner. Most of the software that speaks the protocol is open source[0] and there has been a growing interest in it lately for some reason.

If you were to look at the wider ecosystem, it would be fair to say it's a genie that won't be placed back inside its bottle. More info here:

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub

[0] but there is no rule that says this needs to be the case.

It's a Twitter-to-Mastodon mirror. From their source page, https://sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/ -

> Bird.makeup is a way to follow twitter user from any ActivityPub service. The aim is to make tweets appear as native a possible to the fediverse, while being as scalable as possible. Unlike BirdsiteLive, bird.makeup doesn't use official twitter api, but the undocumented frontend api, just like nitter.net, which doesn't have rate limiting.

These kinds of services will always be vulnerable. Especially now that the Twitter API is getting monetised.

I had the same goal: helping Twitter users transition to Mastodon. But I decided to go about it a different way: by getting Mastodon into Twitter user’s timeline. So I created a browser extension to do just that. It’s definitely not a perfect either, but I hope it will be a useful way for some to transition or at least get exposure to Mastodon.

The extension is here: https://chirper.picheta.me

I took a shot at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045737

Hard to get traction; doesn't really fit with Mastodon culture; and Elon will shut it down as soon as it hits his radar.

Having said all this, there needs to be a realistic, scalable way to migrate Twitter users (and their following/followers) or Mastodon will remain a niche platform IMHO.

Will this stop working when Twitter makes its API a paid service in a few days?

No, per https://sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/:

> Unlike BirdsiteLive, bird.makeup doesn't use official twitter api, but the undocumented frontend api, just like nitter.net, which doesn't have rate limiting.

If it's undocumented, how would someone know that it doesn't have rate limiting?

It probably does have rate limiting, just not a low enough limit to be noticeable.

nitter.net is rate limited and can't display twitter data the majority of times I use it. Other nitter instances are better. There's definitely rate limiting going on.

Messaging apps implement this "X is now on Y" feature which, while invasive, is very effective in reconstituting social graphs. I wonder how that could be implemented on the fediverse. A brute force way would be to scan your birdsite data dump and try to find if any of the same handles exist.

ah yes, another fork of BirdSiteLive. Every one seems to make their own fork of that thing. And none of them (that I've found) set a user agent when delivering messages to other AP servers.

You can see where bird.makeup sets the headers here[0] (with a distinct lack of user agent) and an issue I filed against the upstream[1] asking them to please set a user agent.

[0] https://git.sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/tree/master/item/src...

[1] https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive/issues/188

It's not clear to me how this works. Is this following Twitter handles and forwarding posts to ActivityPub?

This allows you to follow Twitter people from ActivityPub. Twitter doesn't federate (it doesn't even allow third party clients at this point) but this bridge will do all of the federation work for Twitter.

Basically, if you want to follow Twitter user @barbazoo, you search for @barbazoo@bird.makeup and hit follow. Their tweets will show up in your client as if they were sent through ActivityPub.

This service can poll/subscribe to Twitter users or search for posts actively, then turn the results into ActivityPub posts.

I run a walled-off version of BirdSiteLive, which this is based off, that does the same thing (but uses the Twitter API which will probably shut down soon). I guess I'm going to have to migrate.

I’ve been using it for the few accounts I really miss from Twitter and it works perfectly.

Is there a service like that, but where you can bridge back replies from Mastodon to Twitter?

I didn't think about it deeply, but it would be nice to be able to log in with Twitter and basically extend the network.

"Search this handle to find it in your instance"

"Could not find anything for these search terms"

Not really sure how this is supposed to work.

depends on your instance. eg. mastodon.social seems to block this which is reason for me to consider moving

I would log for this to work but these bots always have 0 posts in their timelines.

Doesn’t Twitter just shut this sort of thing down?

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